Popo

I’m playing Yakuza LaD on my laptop while the other half plays on the PS5, and it’s almost perfect today. I’ve had some very iffy performance out of X-Cloud in the past, but maybe I got Series X hardware tonight? Anyway, no noticeable lag, some stuttering on occasion, but very smooth. Beng able to just pick up where I left off on my paid-for Xbox copy on the streaming Gamepass version on a completely different device is fantastic. Microsoft have really nailed the user experience.

Sonic & Knuckles (1994) And that's all the classic Sonic games done again. So glad I was able to add the missing entries to my Xbox library. I'm not very fussy, and I'm sure you can find better versions of these games, but I thought they were great. Firewatch (2018) A very atmospheric walking simulator with a fun mystery at its centre, carried through by two great performances by main characters. Exploring a US national park, it has moments of fun exploration and relaxing contentment, induced by the calming sounds of nature. It clocks in at a concise 5 or so hours and certainly doesn't overstay its welcome. I had rather hoped the game would focus more on Henry, the player character, and the background with his sick wife and the developing relationship with Delilah, his supervisor with whom he is only able to communicate by way of a radio (and never meets during the game), but sadly the ending doesn't really deal with this in a satisfactory way, wrapping up rather suddenly. Very good, but a word of warning - on Switch, performance is not good, struggling to maintain 30 fps throughout, and frequently stuttering and freezing. Best played on a more powerful system.

The French voice actors deliver a better performance in their native language than in a foreign language? Is that funny?

A hint regarding MCC - you can uninstall individual games from the options menu. It’s a beast, and you do need to download the whole thing first, but if you’re struggling for space I’d start there. I can only imagine how many petabytes of bandwidth in downloaded-then-immediately-deleted Halo games Microsoft’s data centres have had to serve up needlessly thanks to the way their own game is designed.

As this is included with PS Plus I’ve played it for a couple of hours this evening. It reminds me a lot of Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, in that it’s visually AAA, but the gameplay is pared back to something more befitting of a smaller team with a tighter budget. I like this approach to development, even though I do find I have to hold my nose sometimes and try to ignore the dissonant effect that painted on doors and one way corridors rendered to look like real world environments gets you. I think Hellblade does a better job of hiding this, but APT:I is just so gorgeous it feels churlish to complain too much, the developers have done such a great job here. Much better if you switch to French language for the voices - the English voices are unconvincing, and, more to the point, the game is French.

That’ll be the story then.

Is there a story here? I bought Max Payne 3 digitally for the 360, but it’s not in my game library on Series X. At first I thought it was weird, but didn’t think too much about it - maybe I thought wrong, and I owned it on disc? But nope, definitely a missing digital game.

I don’t recognise the equivalence between wanting more of the same thing and not being sold on the execution of the direction they took the character.

Yea right - if Barney had an extra jaw growing out the side of his face full of razor teeth, two bony limbs with spikes on the ends shooting out his back and scuttled across the ceiling at 25mhp, then the Necromorphs are about as scary as Barney, sure.

The IGN preview there highlights a few different elements at play (the upgrading, the different kinds of enemies) that could potentially keep the moment to moment gameplay fresh and emergent, but then unfortunately do say that wasn’t their experience, and that their sessions were a bit repetitive and by the numbers. Even if the latter proves to be the case I still think this will be fun for 5 minutes. The camera movement is a little jerky for my liking, but I can see myself playing it with friends, a cold beer perspiring on the table beside me, quoting lines from Aliens at each other and having a good time of it. Also, Working Joe’s are back! Everybody loved them, right?

20 years! That’s 10,512,000 New York minutes.

@metallicfrodo is right and you won't be able to use the trial after you've nabbed yourself a GPU sub, but if you did the 3 months trial, bought 2 years of Gold (£39.99 from CD Keys) and upgraded for the cost of 1 month of GPU (£10.99) the total cost would be £90.97 for 29 months* of GPU (about £3.13 per month). Or sack off the trial, buy 3 years and convert for £1 for £120.97 (or £3.36 per month). Do check my numbers! So yes, sack off the trial and buy 3 years - basically the same cost to you per month, but you've locked it in for longer, and Microsoft could withdraw the conversion offer in the future. *You get a bonus month of Gold when you add a code if you opt to auto-renew, from what I recall - doesn't work if you buy 3 years' worth, because you won't be able to add the third year of Gold to your account (3 years is the maximum you can have on hand).

@K the latter, but you can still upgrade for a certain amount later. I'm not sure how much, can only find the value in dollars, but it seems to be the cost of one month of GPU.

Alternatively, download the Apple TV app on your PS5 and upon launching it you’ll be offered the 6 months. I had to force an app update to make it happen.

Time travel.